Tom Hammond looked up from the little booklet,—a look of bewilderment was in his eyes, a sense of blankness, almost of stupefaction, in his mind. Like one who, half stunned, passes through some strange and wondrous experience, and slowly recalls every item of that experience as fuller consciousness returns, he went, mentally, slowly over the story of the little book.
“The verisimilitude of the whole story is little less than startling,” he murmured. His eyes dropped upon the book again, and he read the last line aloud: “Well, I have been a fool.”
Slowly, meditatively, he added: “And I, with every other otherwise sane man who has been careless as to whether such things are to be, am as big a fool as the man in that book!”
He laid the dainty little messenger down on the table by his bedside. His handling of the book was almost reverential. Reaching to the electric lever, he switched off the light. He wanted to think, and he could think best in the dark.
“Of course, I know historically,” he mused, “all the events of the Christ’s life, His death, His resurrection, and—and——Well, there, I think, my knowledge ends. In a vague way I have always known that the Bible said something of a great final denouement to all the World Drama—an award time of some kind, a millennium of perfect—perfect—well perfect everything that is peaceful and——Oh, I don’t know much about it, after all. I am very much in a fog, I see, for Mrs. Joyce and that booklet both speak of a return of Christ into the air, whither certain dead and certain living are to be caught up to be with Him and to begin an eternity of bliss.”
For a moment or two he tried to disentangle his many thoughts; then, with a weary little sigh, he gave up the task, murmuring: “I certainly am not ready for any such event. If there is to be a hideous leaving behind of the unready, then I should be left to all that unknown hideousness.”
A myriad thoughts crowded upon his brain. He gave up, at length, the perplexing attempt to think out the problem, telling himself that with the coming of the new day he would begin a definite search for the real facts of this great mystery—the second coming of Christ.
By an exercise of his will he finally settled himself to sleep.